Dharma Thakur

This chapter offers an overview of the botanical lore in Śūnyapurāṇ, a heterogeneous Bengali text attributed to Rāmāi Paṇḍit. The work celebrates the god Dharmarāj through a lengthy cosmogonic narrative and short ritual tracts, eulogies and an array of legends drawing from Sanskrit Purāṇas and Bengali folklore. Here I analyse the place of flowers and rice in the worship of Dharmarāj. Three sections will be discussed: the plucking and offering of flowers (puṣpatolān); the birth of paddy (dhānyer janma), which includes the popular tale of the farming (kr̥ṣak) Śiva, and the auspicious song of the husking pedal (ḍheṅkīmaṅgalā).

The essential traits of the Dharma cult are grounded in the folklore of the agricultural people of Rarh (West Bengal). The annual worship of Dharma, the gajan, is here examined on a gender basis. By considering fertility as the leitmotif of the cult and Dharma worship the masculinization of an ancestral female cult, I shall focus on the presence of blood as the discriminator in ritual acts. I argue that while female devotees foster and care for the deity by virtue of their own body, men are in a position of 'guiltiness' and they must ritually become women. Thus the two intruding acts par excellence (ploughing the soil and sexual intercourse) are ritually replaced by piercing men's flesh. Self-tortures and immolation will be discussed in order to examine the gajan as the dramatic representation of the hierogamy among Bengali agricultural people.

"The paper describes the concluding rite of the gajan, a major hierogamic celebration of West Bengal. The night before the end of the festival, ascetic devotees dance with rotten human corpses and human heads in honour of Dharma Thakur, a local fertility deity. After giving a description of the ritual, I try to enlighten the relation between the fertility leitmotif of the gajan and its climax: the danse macabre (dance of death). The practice of sporting with corpses and their ritual beheading will be analysed by furnishing a psychoanalytical and cross-cultural interpretation. In order to do that, it will be suggested that the
ritual behaviour of Dharma’s devotees is due to the gender modification of the actual recipient of the service. Only if we accept that the object of worship is female (the Goddess, Dharma’s spouse), will it be possible to explain the psychical crises occurring to male devotees and their efforts to become ‘ritual women’. The paradigm of the ‘guilty male’ of agricultural societies will be further analysed by comparing the Bengali mar:a¯ khela¯ (playing with corpses) with similar practices within different cultural environments, including Sanskrit Puranic lore, Greek mythology and Italian popular Catholicism."

Guilty Males and Proud Females is the first complete study on the Bengali gajan festival dedicated to Dharmaraj, a village god in the Rarh region of Bengal. The gajan is the dramatic representation of the marriage of a god and goddess, and the recreation of the life-cycle of earth. As Fabrizio Ferrari explains one of the most fascinating aspects of the gajan is its approach to gender. The central deity of the gajan is a goddess identified with the earth. To please such a goddess, male devotees must acknowledge the pain they inflict towards the female world and become “ritual women.” Conversely, as part of the festival, women display their generative power and provoke the jealousy of men by ritually mocking conception and delivery. The outcome of the ritual is that their suffering is acknowledged and transformed into power.

Much more than an ethnography of Bengali popular religion, Guilty Males and Proud Females contributes to new studies on gender transformation in the Bengal region and will be of interest to scholars of South Asian religions, folklore, and gender studies